Residual Haunting

Remember now the fraying of shadows,

the transparency of hours witnessed through a veil

stitched tightly with wandering forgottens.

Time lifts languidly past towered waves 

that roar blackly against sorrow's sands,

like tears and scratches on the lost attic film,

or wounded hands clasped against the darkfall.

Now remain indoors, the storm has descended

this snow-wreath'd mountaintop,

and no headlights dare cut the gloom

as you steer your crumbled way across

your map of worn, indulgent nostalgia,

thrust into the arms of regret, of towns

with stray-dog borders and 

wayward allegiances devouring

along fire-carved hillsides.

There's gravity in these harrowed fields,

these slow sleeping buildings and interstates, 

and the glow through the collapsed birches

where the sun decays its abject half-life,

a land swept apart by candles in windows

and hex signs scrawled in chalk on barn doors, 

the whisper of shorelines and skiffs unsailed,

and the songbird's most desolate call.

Night Work

Your signal fires are paling now, 

all that luminescent vitriol

sputtering back to the earth like

spent catherine wheels 

in the half-lit summer chill,

or the blossoming of fireworks

flowers over the high school fields

of this half-shadowed youth,

pines lingering beyond the goalposts

and the looming levees,

their jagged black spires 

like knives aimed towards 

impossibly distant stars,

a receding gloom of embers

as the rusting years commence.

An Incantation

Gather and join hands together,
this is the autumn of our mountain.
The blindfold is thin protection
against the black winds raging
from the snowcapped peaks
through the hollow eaves of the valley.

This void stands, precariously balanced
in the talons of shadowy birds,
hunting the gray skies as the
crops erode into dust,
and the windows are shuttered
against the promise of a darkened dawn.

Scratch each name across a clouded mirror,
and draw an X through every one.
This is the blood season of last things,
and last words to recall them by.

Wraiths

In youth there were days of such blinding splendor

that in each scratched and faded photograph we're wincing,

as if we were all staring at the sun in our backyards, 

collectively waiting for some fantastic rapture to descend.

In those times I knew every fire road like my own skin,

every bone and vein of those rutted secret trails

carving at the forests beyond the neighborhood.

This was my topography, our permanent abandon.

Now those lines have trailed away into hovering mist

between bent branches, disappearing beneath leaves and logs

or ensnared in the rusted teeth of bear traps yawning metallically.

Now the timber paths have sung their last refrain,

and haunted, shrink softly into the horizon.

Memory Oval

As time defeats its half-life,

the already opaque shades darker,

a shadowed tree on gray and snowy land,

bordered in the depths of a mirror made of mercury,

ornate golden edges crumbling against 

a disappeared realm of peeling wall-roses,

in a room where seconds dissolve like hours,

and the years seem hollow and unfathomable,

all dust and ash and corroded tarnish,

without human whispers to support them.

Early April, Burlington

Winter's bitter grasp has receded now,

though lines of faded light still haunt 

the distant hills at evening's close,

and the trees remain gray configurations of bones

in the deepening green of waking backyards. 

There's still traces of earth and cold lingering in these walls, 

territories of candied frost along windowsills and steps,

and though the birds have grown bolder in their stirrings,

we remember the silent cast of snow on unlit streets,

and the rattle of plows traversing the neighborhood.

Yesterday, the cat brought me a rabbit,

young and soft as a fallen feather,

a single claw piercing its heart, staining the 

fresh white fur with the deepest cloak of red. 

At day's, end, she had felled another 

and left it on the porch threshold where we ate,

and it seemed spring's magnetic orbits 

of birth and death were there with us,

like a feastbound ghost floating in the margins. 

Forest Fire, Linville Falls, 2007

How these dark flames lick at the branches of thorn

on the trembling hot eve of summer,

and whittle them to broken gray ash

with sparks showering orange pinpoints in the gloom,

each tree cowered helpless before the conflagration. 

This horizon was a jagged collection of black spikes

halo'd with pulsing columns of fire, 

striking lakes to pools of hell and murk,

instantly fossilizing the quicksilver of life beneath.

There is only open country 

and worried stars beyond this fevered blaze,

and the frame houses where rural faces float worried

at yellow-washed kitchen windows, 

the pair of us looming in the sour air 

at the threshold of a church parking lot

as the mountain crumbles and burns,

a swath of furious red, 

as if an airliner made an unscheduled landing

in the depths of these woods,

and burst into pieces upon arrival.